Machine Of Death (33 page)

Tommy studied her as she undressed, tracing her delicate curves with his eyes, following the cascade of long hair about her shoulders when she undid her pony tail. The dark strands flirted with the tops of her breasts. She should have been subverting society from the pages of a fashion magazine instead of driving getaway cars. Tommy doubted that many revolutionaries looked the way she did, moved with her grace.

She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled, as if she could peer inside his head the way the machine did into blood. It was a wicked grin, a silent invitation. She took mock pains to hide her body from his view as she slid under the covers in the lamplight. She patted the bed beside her. Her skin was warm and velvety against his when he joined her. She doused the light and wrapped her legs around him.

They cuddled for a time after the sex, which had made him tingle and drained him of the remaining adrenaline from the evening, and he fell asleep to the whisper of suggestive words in his ear. 

He slept and dreamed of Davey. 

When Tommy was eight, his parents had sat him down in the living room and told him they were having another baby. His memories of Davey’s arrival were faint, blurred together at the edges—a lingering sense of his mother’s absence, spending the night at Aunt Ruth’s with his cousins Melanie and Sara, and then the sound of crying and the stink of dirty diapers. 

By the time he turned eleven, Tommy had noticed the protective bubble his parents wrapped around Davey. Things that hadn’t been an issue for Tommy at Davey’s age were withheld from his younger brother—toys with small or moving parts; puzzles; board games. He wasn’t allowed to pick up change, or stones that fit in the palm of his hand. His parents were phobic about Davey putting things in his mouth, about him not chewing his food, about any cold that produced a cough. 

One event haunted Tommy. When Davey was three, their mother flew into a frenzy of motion and sound when she noticed Davey playing with a plastic grocery bag. He was bothering no one, piling his blocks in the bag and taking them out, over and over. Ma tore the bag from Davey’s hands, sending blocks tumbling through the air. Shaking, she stood over him, screaming “NO!” as if he’d soiled the rug. A lone block clutched in his quivering hand, Davey cried with a lack of comprehension that cut Tommy to the bone.

Articulate, bright, Davey was always looking over his shoulder, petrified of running afoul of rules he couldn’t predict. The sole time he tried to explain it to Tommy ended with a long sigh and a question. “Tommy, could they love me too much?”

A week after he turned five, Davey died in his room, alone, a victim of his own curiosity. Out of sight for a few minutes, he’d taken it upon himself to explore forbidden fruit, denied him for so long and snatched from a kitchen cabinet with everyone unawares: a handful of peanuts. Anaphylactic shock was the official cause. Much later, when Tommy was in high school, his father added the missing colors to the picture. Tommy’s parents had consented to a machine test of Davey’s blood at birth. The doctor had promoted it to them as a “preventive measure.” The little slip of paper spit out as result read “SUFFOCATION”. 

“We started out worrying he’d get strangled in his blankets,” his father said. “Then we focused on the size of things. We even considered allergies. He never had a problem with peanuts before.” Dad, a man of small stature bowed even lower by his younger son’s death, shrugged as if trying to loosen an unseen grip on his neck. “What good is knowing the future if you can’t do anything with the knowledge?”

They’d swallowed the poisoned punch and Davey had died from it. Even if the machine was infallible and Davey was meant to die young, it enraged Tommy that his brother’s brief life could have been measures better if his parents hadn’t tried to second-guess the future.

Tommy had refused testing at every juncture from that day. He didn’t want to know what waited for him. 

Barb’s story was as senseless in its tragedy, trading an innocent brother for a pragmatic father. Her dad had given up living when the machine looked into his blood and foretold “
CANCER
.” Even when his doctor confirmed the disease and declared it treatable, survivable for decades, Barb’s father surrendered. He didn’t want anyone to bear the burden or the uncertainty of a protracted fight. When the cancer consumed him in months, rather than the years it might have taken, Barb was galvanized against the machine’s unholy test. 

After long discussions online, and the discovery that they were classmates, Tommy and Barb began to meet in the real world. More like-minded souls joined them over the course of a year. What began as a support group evolved into something else. They discovered in themselves the spirit of Berkeley, of Kent State—radicals standing against the powers that be, taking back something stolen from them, reclaiming it in ways impossible through endless debate in a chat room. 

Tommy awoke to Barb shaking his shoulder. Pale pink light from the streetlamp outside gave the shadowy room a spectral glow. Tommy rubbed his eyes and groaned. Phantoms of Davey, three-year-old hand still clutching a block and quivering, receded into the corners.

“You were whimpering,” Barb said. 

Tommy nodded. “Sorry. Dreams. Davey.”

He was quiet for a long time, listening to his own breathing. Barb laid a hand on his chest. “Where are you?”

“Thinking about tonight. The Repeater at the mall.”

“What about her?” Barb wrapped her arms around him and eased his head to her chest. He snuggled against her, sought solace in the sift of her fingers through his hair. 

“All her life, she’s been taught how to increase her chances of living a long life. Then one day, she learns she’s going to die in some fashion she’s always been told can be prevented. Maybe ‘heart attack.’ She makes changes—quits smoking, improves her diet, joins the gym—and she keeps going back to see if she’s tipped some cosmic scale, to no avail. She might die of a heart attack when she’s a hundred years old, except she’s crippled inside by waiting for it. She’s stopped living her life. She’s devoted it to her death.”

Barb kissed the top of his head. “We did well today. We’ll never know whose lives we may have changed just by breaking the right machine at the right time. For all we know, we may have shaped the opinion of a future leader who will finally outlaw the damned things.”

“It still doesn’t feel like enough,” Tommy said. “Half of what we trashed today will be back in action in a week or two. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a soup can.” He stopped, sighed. “We need something bigger. More effective. A statement.”

Barb reached out and turned on the bedside lamp. For a few moments, Tommy’s field of vision was a bright blot. As it cleared, he saw Barb, still beautiful and pale and very naked, rooting around in the night table. She pulled a gray file folder from under a stack of notebooks and papers. “I didn’t want to say anything until I thought we were ready.”

She set the folder on the bed. Tommy leafed through it—diagrams, floor plans, handwritten notes of conversations.

“What is this?” he asked, fascinated by the photos of long hallways and large rooms filled with equipment. Barb slipped back under the covers beside him.

“This,” Barb said, “is as big a statement as we can make.” 

Klemm Fabrication Incorporated, located in Caruthers, fifty minutes down Route 171 from Barb’s apartment, was the largest manufacturer of Death Predictive Devices in the Midwest. They’d come to Barb’s attention via a Newsweek article discussing the company’s efforts to meet the rising global demand for the devices. She’d done a lot of social engineering to gather information from workers, county engineers, technicians who made service calls at the plant. She used her smile and charm, taking pieces from every encounter to form a complete picture of a vulnerable site.

“We take out the key points in the assembly line,” Barb told the group when they met to discuss their next action, four days later. They were all still wired from the success of their blitz, and Tommy could see everyone was hungry for more. They’d gathered in Penny’s suite on campus because it was the largest, plus it was in the Brewer dorms, where a large gathering would go unnoticed among the louder, more obvious frat parties. “Belts. Motors. The computers that control the operation. We destroy power conduits. We destroy the swing-arms that do the detailed work on the guts of the machine. We put them out of commission for weeks. Months.”

“How do you propose we do all this?” Roger asked. He ran a pro-machine Web site as a cover for his lesser-known affiliations. He was also a campus radio personality. “A hammer’s good one at a time, but it’s balls for heavy work. Too time consuming.”

“We use localized, shaped explosives,”  Barry said, with a nod from Barb. He was a chemical engineering student who blamed the machine’s predictions for hastening the suicides of two friends. “Small, hot, hard blast, localized within a few feet. Like a cutting charge. You could snap the rear axle on a car and only nudge the engine.” As if the words were insufficiently shocking, Barry pulled a sample out of his backpack. Non-lethal and inert, he assured them, but it drove Mitch from his chair. 

“I signed on for small public disruptions, not bombs,” Mitch said. “The malls, the one-off drugstore machine, fine. Explosives are crazy. We should step it up on larger medical testing locations instead. Doctor’s offices, clinics, hospitals. If people think they’re at risk, they’ll stay away.”

“That makes us look like terrorists,” Tommy said.

“Isn’t that what we are?” Mitch persisted. “Let’s not kid ourselves. You think people in malls aren’t scared of a guy in a mask with a hammer?”

“Right now, we’re stirring debate about the machine and what it does, not about ourselves,” Barb said. “The first time we threaten the safety of people with no interest in the machine, in a place of trust like a hospital, we become the bad guys.”

“I understand that, Barb,” Mitch said. For the first time, Tommy noticed the kid of seventeen inside him. Tommy was accustomed to a Mitch who was calm, decisive, old beyond his years. Before him now was a boy, nervous and uncertain. “I just think moving on to bombs is asking to get someone killed.”

“It will be after hours,” she said. “Clean. Surgical. We cripple the infrastructure, sting the corporation, make a statement to the press. We open peoples’ eyes wide to the issue.” 

They debated a while longer. In the end, Barb required a unanimous decision. Mitch held out until he knew he was standing alone. He went on record that it was a bad idea before voting to go forward with the action.

Once they were in agreement, they sat around the coffee table in Penny’s living room and began walking through Barb’s plan.  

They rehearsed for two weeks. They went over timings and variables until they could navigate the factory building with their eyes closed. Penny wrote the manifesto for mailing to the Tribune, the New York papers, the Post in Washington, and the L.A. Times
.
They called themselves the Unknown Future Liberation Front, “proud architects of last night’s targeted strike.” 

They took the evening before the operation to relax. Barb invited Tommy over to her place to blow off steam. Despite the sparkle in her eye and the excited ache he felt, he declined. Saying no didn’t come easily, but he wanted some space, though he couldn’t articulate why. Beyond her disappointment, he thought he saw hurt in her eyes, but dismissed the notion. That wasn’t who they were.

His roommate out of town for the weekend, Tommy stayed on campus. He ordered Chinese take-out to his room, hung out with a couple of girls from the East wing of the dorm and watched anime until he fell asleep. His dreams were crowded with massive steel machines that towered over him, sharp teeth trying to draw his blood, ribbons of paper blotting out the sky and inscribed with the words “
MISADVENTURE
.”

His cell phone rang, piercing his sleep and dragging him up to consciousness. The room was bright with daylight. Sounds of student life filtered in from beyond the door. Tommy answered on the last ring before voicemail. He expected Barb or Mitch with bad news, a call to flee the dorm one step ahead of the police, the fate of all dozing rebels. Instead, it was his mother. 

His mother never called.

She made small talk about the weather and his father’s job and her current book club selection, while Tommy stretched and threw on a layer of day-old clothing. When she finally ran out of stalls, she said “They’re voting on a draft bill Monday for soldiers for the Middle East.”

“I know, Ma,” he said. “It’s college. We keep an eye on these things.” They had been talking about it for weeks, in and out of class. Had he not been involved in disrupting the machine, Tommy would have joined one of the protests. He had friends who would vanish on a straight line to the sand in the wake of such a bill. “It’ll be fine. These things get voted down every year. This one will, too. And even if it doesn’t, I’m protected by the deferments.”

“No you’re not,” she interrupted.

“I’m an only child. Plus, there are very specific criteria for selection of college students. Believe me, I’ve looked into this. Don’t make yourself crazy.”

“Tommy, I had you tested when you were three years old.”

It was a graceless blurt, but it hit his chest like a finely tossed grenade. “You did
what?
”

“I always planned to tell you when the time seemed right,” she said, and fell silent. Tommy could hear her ragged breathing into the receiver.

“Why are you doing this, Ma? Why now?” He stopped. He didn’t want to know, hadn’t wanted to, so long as no one else did. And here was his mother, the woman who overcompensated his brother into misery, the unknowable known to her, not for a day, or a year, but for sixteen years.

“I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t think it was important.”

“How?” he asked, even as a voice inside told him to hang up the phone and walk away. “What does the fucking contraption have to say about it?”

“I don’t want you to worry. That wasn’t my intent—”

“Just tell me,” he said. “You wouldn’t have called unless you wanted to say it, so say it.” There was silence by way of response.  ”God damn it, tell me!”